


Out of the Blue

by jlu211



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Best Friends, Eyeliner, M/M, Nail Painting, Soft Boys, skinny love, theyre in love don’t argue with me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-10 02:18:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20520332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jlu211/pseuds/jlu211
Summary: Eddie asks Richie to come over, and assures him there’s nothing wrong.Richie’s gets to the Kaspbrak’s to find Eddie with his mom’s beauty box.—In which a whipped boy helps his best friend paint his nails.





	Out of the Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to Ellie, who showed me Jack’s live with his nail’s painted. 
> 
> Follow me on twitter @/beverlyskey i want more friends in the fandom!
> 
> feel free to leave a comment :)  
-juls

Normally, a call out of the blue from Eddie Kaspbrak didn’t mean anything good. Last time he had called Richie like this, it was to tell the nearsighted boy that he was grounded and wouldn’t be able to sneak into the Drive-In with the rest of the losers that night. So, when Richie answered the phone--there was no one else home to get it--and the small boy was on the other line, his heart dropped, thinking of a million negatives.

_He came home with a bruise and Sonia quarantined him? He came home with a cough and she’s rushing him to the ER? He came home with some skittles in his pocket and she got angry?_

Despite all of Richie’s your mom jokes about the control freak who had raised such a pure boy, he wouldn’t hesitate to try and kick her ass on Eddie’s behalf. She had stripped him of too many classic childhood experiences to ever be truly forgiven. 

But when Eddie responds to his greeting with “Trashmouth, can you come over?” Richie’s heart instantly slows down. 

“You’re okay, right, Spaghetti?” He has to make sure.

Eddie lets out a laugh and Richie finds himself gripping onto the kitchen counter so he doesn’t melt into a puddle over the sound. “I’m fine, now shut the fuck up and get over here.”

Richie didn’t have to be told twice, not saying anything before hanging up the landline and rushing upstairs to grab his faded backpack. Within 3 minutes, he was on his bike, on the way over to the Kaspbrak house. 

Dropping his bike at the side of the house, he doesn’t bother to knock on the front door, instead poking his head in and shouting out, “Hello?”

There’s a beat before Eddie’s distant voice calls back. “Upstairs!”

Richie bounds up them, two at a time before reaching the asthmatic boy’s open door. “Hey.”

Eddie’s sitting on the floor, an open box in front of him. “Come sit,” Eddie points to the spot next to him. Richie notices that the fingernails on his outstretched hand are sloppily painted a dark gray color. 

“What did you need help with?” He asks, sitting down. 

Eddie hands him a small bottle, holding his hands out flat, palms down. Richie notices only his left hand is coated with the gray color. “I’m right handed, so I can’t paint my right hand.” Even sitting, he has to look up to meet Richie’s eyes, and he pouts. 

“You called me here to paint your nails?” The lanky boy chuckles.

Eddie looks down, biting his lip. He speaks in a small voice. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.” He reaches out to take the nail polish bottle back. 

Richie holds it away from him with one hand, and reaches out for his unpainted hand with the other. “Eds, I never said I didn’t want to.”

He gets a sigh of relief in response, and Eddie puts his painted hand down, resting it under his other hand, to kind of give Richie more stability to paint, since Eddie’s hands are on his knee. 

Richie opens the bottle, wiping off the extra on the inside of the top before starting on the tanner boy’s thumb. His jaw clenching as he concentrates. 

Eddie watches, amazed. “How’d you know to get the extra polish off?”

“I helped Bev paint her nails a few times,” he shrugs. “I got yelled at when I didn’t wipe the extra off, but like they don’t exactly teach guys how to paint nails.”

Eddie nods, and stays silent has Richie finishes the rest of his nails. Richie’s grateful, because he can feel Eddie’s stare on him, and he doesn’t think he can form coherent sentences. 

“They look good, thank you,” Eddie smiles. Richie nods, putting the bottle back in the box. He rifles around, pulling out a skinny tube. 

“What’s this?”

“Eyeliner, I think,” Eddie raises an eyebrow. “I’ve never used it.”

“You should try it,” Richie states. “Remember when Bev started wearing it and it made her eyes pop?”

Eddie shakes his head. “It’s okay. I think the nails are enough. Plus, my nails are wet so I shouldn’t be touching my eye.”

“I could do it, yeah? Just, like, close your eyes and I’ll try my best. No promises.” 

Richie can see Eddie weighing the pros and cons internally before he finally nods. “Alright.”

Once he leans forward and closes his eyes, Richie uncaps the pencil and puts his left hand on the outer corner of Eddie’s eye, trying to flatten it out to make his drawing surface more even. “Don’t flinch, you don’t want this in your eye,” Richie instructs before starting to draw with a faint stroke in the middle of his eye. 

Eddie sits still, thinking about how his mother would kill him if he went blind. He even shallowly breathes, not wanting to distract from Richie’s focus. Even though his eyes aren’t open, he can feel how close Richie is leaning into him. He’s probably so close just because he wanted to make sure he was doing it correctly, despite having perfect vision thanks to the thick panes of glass in front of his eyes. This is the closest the two boys have ever physically been, and Eddie literally can’t even see it. 

“Okay, all done, now other eye,” Richie exhales.

Eddie cuts him off, “Wait! Can I blink? My eyes are getting dry.”

“Yeah,” Richie confirms, and Eddie opens his eyes. Wow, they _are_ close. He momentarily forgets why he asked to have his eyes open, before he starts blinking. “What if I put eyeliner on the bottom lashes, too?” Richie wonders aloud. 

The doe eyed boy nods. “Sure, let me know what I need to do.”

“Just keep your eyes open, and look up at the ceiling.” He instructs, and Eddie’s eyes soon fixate on a poster above his bed. “Now, really don’t flinch.” The pencil comes in contact with his lower lash line, and Eddie wants to blink. So. Bad. But out of his peripheral vision, he can see Richie having leaned in even closer to focus. He feels the taller boy move further away, and then doesn’t feel the pressure around his eye. “There,” Richie puts the pencil down. “Not so bad, right?” 

“I can’t see, Rich,” Eddie laughs, getting up and running into the bathroom, making sure to flip the switch on with his hand that was already dry. “Woah!”

Richie walks in behind him. “What do you think?”

“I look good,” Eddie gasps in amazement , admiring both his nails and eyes in the mirror.

_You always do_, Richie doesn’t vocalize. He just hums in response. 

“Can I put eyeliner on you?” Eddie asks, making eye contact with the curly haired boy in the mirror. 

Richie, unable to ever tell him no, nods, and soon he’s being led by the smaller boy back into his room. 

“It’s probably not gonna be good,” Eddie pouts, sitting up on his knees so he’s the same height as Richie. 

Richie shrugs. “It’s okay, it’s just for you and me, right?” Eddie liked the sound of things being just for them. So, he nods, and Richie closes his eyes.

Eddie tried his best, he really does. He can’t help but wailing when he smudges it, though.

“What happened?” Richie asks, calmly, eyes still closed. 

“I smudged it.”

“That’s okay,” a small smile plays out on his chapped lips. “I’ll still like it, however it looks.”

“O-okay.” Eddie nods, even though Richie can’t see it. He continues drawing. _Really, Ed? A stutter?_ he thinks to himself.

Richie thought Eddie stumbling over his words was the cutest thing, but he doesn’t want to distract Eddie and make him get upset if he messes up again.

“Okay, all done.” Eddie sits back on his heels and caps the eyeliner, putting it back in the box. “I’ll go out this back in mom’s room if you wanna go look at yourself in the mirror.”

Richie nods, and they get up together, but go different directions once out of Eddie’s room.

Eddie split from him so he can miss the look of disappointment on Richie’s face when he sees how bad Eddie fucked up his eyeliner. 

But to his surprise, as Eddie puts the beauty box back on Sonia’s dresser, he hears words of praise come out of the bathroom. 

“Eddie, you did a great job!” He can practically hear the smile on Richie’s face. And Richie rarely smiled. Unless he was with Eddie, then he smiled a lot. 

Eddie makes sure everything is how it was in his mom’s room before going into the bathroom. Richie is still looking at himself in the mirror in awe. “Now we match. Eyeliner twins,” Eddie laughs. 

“You wanna get ice cream? My treat.” Richie asks. 

“I thought you said no one else would see our eyeliner?” He looks confused. 

“That was before I found out how much I like how it looks on me,” Richie winks, pushing the short boy out of the bathroom and following him out. 

_Richie loved how it looked on Eddie, and he could tell it gave him a boost of confidence, so he didn’t mind wearing unevenly warped lines on his eyes just so he could see Eddie happy, as he knows he wouldn’t go out on his own with it._


End file.
